Ask A Genius 881: Ten Years Isn’t Much
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/02
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, we’ve been talking for nearly ten years. I was fresh off of being fired off of Kimmel. I think Kimmel is a genius, and I think his show is pretty genius; the innovations he brought to Late Night, I don’t think, get acknowledged. He changed the shape to a certain extent of late-night shows, but most people probably think his show is just a run-of-the-mill late-night show. If you watch them, all the shows are different in many ways, and most of them are good in their way. When we started talking in 2014, comedy was less polarized. Kimmel’s from Vegas, and you remember there was a guy who got into The Bellagio with a bunch of arms and shot 500 people and killed 50 of them or something like that? It was one of the biggest massacres in US history. Kimmel got on the air and angrily crying said fuck you to people who don’t stand, who let this kind of shit go on, that people who promote AR-15s and the like. Kimmel came out against Trump, and Kimmel had a kid who needed heart surgery, and I forgot, there were two things that Kimmel came out about on the show.
When I was working there, he really tried pretty hard to remain politically neutral, but then a couple of things happened that he felt strongly enough about to say fuck it, and now the Magus doesn’t trust him; they think he’s just a liberal Hollywood elitist and they say he’s not funny, he’s never been funny and they say that about most of the mainstream late night people because most of them have expressed a lot of scorn towards Trump because Trump is the worst president in history, just a total piece of shit, and keeps getting shittier. So, comedy’s been polarized where the Magas won’t listen to anybody because they’re all liberal Elites, really because they all think Trump’s a piece of shit.
So, now you have Gutfeld, Greg Gutfeld. The show is called Gutfeld on Fox, and it’s Fox’s attempt at a late-night show. I’ve watched very little of it, but it’s no fucking good. I mean, possibly one joke in 10 or 15 might be okay, but mostly, it’s shitty partially because the better writers are not working there and partially because you need to be grounded in reality to make the best jokes. If your jokes are based on bullshit, then they’re not going to be any good. All of the media has become polarized, not in a way that fucks up people who want to make good shit. If you wish to assemble a team to make an excellent superhero movie, it’s not like the polarization has taken away all this prime talent. It’s usually people who are pretty shitty who are forming conservative entertainment enterprises like The Daily Wire and are making movies now that are shitty. The regular entertainment media can still make good shit like The Suicide Squad, the second one directed by James Gunn is the perfect one but conservative enterprises make inferior entertainment for Magas, and they make a good living; they make a good profit because Magas are kind of desperate for entertainment and to patronize or support their point of view.
There’s a lot of money to make to be a conservative pundit. Hannity; 30 million a year; Laura Ingraham; 15 or 20 million a year; Tucker Carlson; 30 million a year before he got fired by Fox; Alex Jones has grossed like a billion dollars selling the bullshit that he sells on his whatever kind of show it is. So, Magas vote with their pocketbooks. So, what else have these last Trumpy years done to comedy? It’s exhausted people. I still love to be a Kimmel, but I feel sorry for him. After eight years, they still have to figure out how to do Trump jokes. I remember having to do Michael Jackson jokes like shit with Michael Jackson kept happening for years, and you felt like you’d run out of shit to say about him. And there were other people like Britney Spears. Sometimes shit got too sad; it went from being funny to being too pathetic to make jokes about Amanda Bynes, and Lindsay Lohan to some extent, but there’s never been such a run of assholery as an eight-year run of Trump being somebody who you can’t avoid talking about on topical late-night shows. It’s tough to make jokes, and people are sick of him.
Then you got this other shit that’s tough to joke about; Israel killing 1% of all the people in Gaza, Gaza killing 1200 Israelis in a brutal terrorist attack, Russia-Ukraine, etc. You could make the case that the world being on fire has cost people their sense of humour, but I don’t think so. All the fucking humour has been squeezed out of Twitter; many of the promising funny people have just left because Twitter is this miserable piece of shit place. Five years ago, I could go on Twitter and read 500 decent jokes every day from America’s funniest people. A lot of them, the majority of them, have been driven out of Twitter, and the percentage of tweets that are funny has, at least in my feed, has dropped from well over half to I don’t know well under 10% which sucks.
SNL has managed to hang in there. Some of the past few years of SNL have been among their funniest. People misremember SNL. SNL’s been on for 47 years now, and often people look back and remember SNL as being funnier than it was, really about one-third of the shit on SNL works, but people don’t remember the shit that doesn’t work, and the shit that does work gets rerun more. SNL has these vintage reruns where they’ll take a 90minut show and cut it down to an hour, and so the shit that doesn’t work gets cut out, but I think SNL’s batting average, and the edginess, the fuck you-liveness of the shit they do I think is super strong right now.
We could also talk about people being turned into assholes by social conditions, by the erosion of everything, by the loss of taboos, by covid eating their brains. Has that made comedy more aggressive and more willing to go into areas that are in really bad taste? I don’t know because then you have the counterforce of assholes trying to cancel people for saying wrong things. So, I can’t tell you for sure, but I can tell you that I’ll put up jokes that are at least close to going over the line. Occasionally there will be a minor effort to cancel me on Twitter, but I’m not big enough to get backlash. Still, I’ve never even got super effective small backlash where when I do get like a couple hundred Magas piling on me to call me an asshole, it hasn’t led to anything bad. However, last week I had to delete a tweet where I attacked a Covid misinformation lady because she said it would be a shame if she had to sue me and has a history of suing people. So, it seemedthe simplest thing to pull down the tweet.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Avoiding any possible legal complications with her seems prudent.
Rosner: Yeah, because I don’t need to get a cease and assist.
Douglas: Do you remember the exact tweet?
Rosner: It may have been along the lines of that… I don’t remember if it’s this, but I know I shouldn’t use the term retard, but with this person, it fits, and then there was some other shit. Oh! I put up links. I put a link to her Wikipedia page and to another article where she was called one of the dirty dozen 12 biggest mid-purveyors of covid and vaccine misinformation, and I don’t think you can sue somebody for calling them a retard; I don’t know or for putting up their Wikipedia but I didn’t want to find out. So, it was just one tweet.
Jacobsen: Do you think people are more sensitive now, as per the right-wing argument, as well as more socially aware and compassionate, as per the liberal argument?
Rosner: I don’t know. That’s one of those things where the thing to do is to take a statistical sample and see what people claim. It’s the same with this the right claims that Biden has dementia, that he’s losing his mind because he’s an old daughtering man and then the left claims that Trump has dementia because he’s an old fat piece of shit, and I’m not convinced of either side. I’ve listened to Biden, and I’m convinced that Biden hasn’t lost it. He sounds very lucid and knowledgeable, and when he has pauses in his speech, it’s because he’s always had a stutter. Now he looks like shit, he looks old as fuck, but I don’t think he’s losing his mind to any extent.
Jacobsen: What about Trump?
Rosner: I don’t know about Trump because Trump’s always been a dipshit blowhard. Still, all anybody would have to do is there are statistical tools to analyze whether somebody has dementia based on what they say doing a longitudinal study comparing how they talked ten years ago to how they talk now. All you’d have to do is like Trump has talked a lot, and there’s no lack of statements out of Trump’s mouth; so, all you’d have to do is take a bunch of shit he said across a couple of decades and see whether there’s a decline in the complexity of his vocabulary. There are probably some other tells, and a high school kid could do it as a science fair project, but nobody’s done it, and I wish somebody would.
Rosner: Is that a call for people to do this?
Rosner: Yeah, I mean, I’ve called for it a couple of times on Twitter, but nobody looks at me on Twitter. But yeah, somebody should do it. Similarly, everybody can talk about how the cancellation era and the polarization I’ve been talking about have made people less nasty or nastier in their comedy. I can’t tell you what it is, but somebody could do a statistical analysis. It wouldn’t be as simple as analyzing Trump’s statement because you’d have to figure out how to get a representative sample of humour on the internet or from standups, and I don’t know, that seems like a tougher thing to do. Still, I think these are legit questions whether the cancellation culture has affected. I feel that I can say almost anything I want to say, that I can joke about almost anything I want to joke about as long as I’m aware of the landscape, what people have been saying about issues and shit. I can’t joke about Gaza-Israel, but I made a Houthi joke that was good in its badness that I don’t see how we can take out the Houthis without significant collateral damage to the blowfish. Are you old enough for that joke to seem like a joke?
Jacobsen: [Laughter] The joke is not finding the joke; the joke is how old the joke is.
Rosner: Yeah. That’s a joke that’s tangential to, that’s adjacent to the Israel-Gaza and that offended nobody except one lady who wasn’t aware of Houthi and the blowfish who tweeted back. Who cares? She thought I was concerned for species of fish in the Gulf that might get injured by bombarding the Houthis.
Jacobsen: That’s pretty cute.
Rosner: Yeah. So, the question is worthy of analysis—the end.
[Recording End]
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